Sony Hints at Next Generation of Wearable Computers 12 страница
“I was having dry heaves,” Stephanie explains. “I threw up before.”
“Why?”
“Well, I cut myself,” Stephanie says. “I cut myself and the guilt makes me throw up.”
“That’s too bad,” I say. “Can you open this door and let me hold your leg?”
“What?”
“Just your leg. Anything warm. Anything but this pipe.”
With a sigh, the cabinet door opens. Bathroom light makes me keep my head low as I crawl out from under the sink and grip Stephanie’s left leg. Then I look up at her. She looks interested in me only as an anthropological specimen. She wears a black Goth semidress that’s less like human clothing and more like one of those choker vines that destroys its host tree and leaves its dead shell clinging to thin air. Her neck is encircled by a collar with chrome studs.
“You’re that guy Chloe likes!” she says above me, a stud sticking out parallel to her nose, her breasts giant mountains. “Jeremy!”
“Yes,” I squeeze.
“Wow, you’re rolling hard.” Stephanie bends down and cups my chin. “Chloe was right; you’re not that cute. You’re supposed to be really cool, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You’re supposed to be, like, you kinda keep to yourself and don’t say much, but you’re really good at something, or something.”
“I’m good at everything!” I smile. I let go of the leg, stand up, pull my shirt to my chin and show off my pecs. “I have a toned body. See?”
“What are those?” Stephanie points at the tops of my fake sartorius muscles.
“Uh, birthmarks.”
“Er, excuse me?” says someone outside the bathroom.
“Shhh,” Stephanie and I both shhh. “I have a cute butt!” I say, bending over the sink to show her. “I know about TV. I like the same things that you like! I have no dandruff—”
“You’re really funny,” Stephanie smiles, putting her hand on my back. “Do you want to see my extra-gorgeous new tattoo?”
“Sure.”
She slowly pulls up the bottom of her dress, revealing the leg that I held a second ago. “See, it’s not a tattoo in the modern sense,” she explains. “The Polynesians used tattoo in very basic, geometric-type patterns. Like lines and stuff?”
Now her skirt is up to her knee. She twists; I see the scabbed-over cut marks that divide her calf into very precise half-centimeters. They stretch like railroad tracks all the way from her ankle up to where her rumpled dress ends—I bet they go up farther than that. They’re neat, razorlike, laserlike, potent, shallow, and thin.
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“Ugg…”
“Aren’t they pretty? That’s why I do them. They’re so pretty; they’re like the only beauty in my world.” She knocks her knees together as if she’s a little girl incredibly pleased with herself.
“Oh man,” I say, backing away. I choke out one word, and it’s not the word I mean to say: “—weird.”
“I know,” Stephanie says, opening her eyes wide. “I’m tragically weird.” She swishes out of the bathroom. “Bye, Jeremy!” She leaves me by the sink, holding on to nothing. Two drunk kids pile in after her and do a double-decker vomit attack on the toilet. They don’t notice me.
Thirty-six
“Michael!”
I stumble down the hall on the second floor, sucking in my frame to squeeze by people leaning against walls, making out with each other and holding each other’s hair. This really sucks. I want to lie down somewhere and hold a pillow or a body or something, but there are no pillows and no bodies and no beds and no rooms and no friends! All my friends are downstairs; up here it’s a lot of loser kids who didn’t want to be friends with me before the squip and who I don’t need now. It’s mostly the losers who are hooking up. Or playing video games.
“Michael!”
Who else am I supposed to ask for? Christine would be good to see but she’s probably not alone in some room anymore—she’s probably been snapped up by Jake Dillinger.
“Yo, Jeremy!”
Brock! No, wait, it’s Rich, calling from the stairs. I walk a few paces back and look down at him. He’s halfway between the first and second floor, his sweaty blond hair in his eyes. The red streak has come around to the front.
“What?”
“You _ _ _ _ _d up or something?” he asks. Loud.
“Well, kind of—”
“Then come downstairs! You gotta see this!” Rich doesn’t bother going up the rest of the way; he just turns and bumps down, banking from banister to banister. I follow more slowly. At the bottom of the steps, in the main living room, Rich makes a right turn. We skirt the couches and go down a green hall. At the end of the hall is a door. The door could be open or it could be closed; I can’t tell because it’s teeming with teenage male life. Guys are crammed around it so tightly that some of them have piled on top of each other, in a sort of cheerleading pyramid, to see inside. (So the door must be open.) The guys are murmuring to one another, concentrating. They’re surprisingly quiet.
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“It’s the only way,” Rich says. “You gotta see this. Duck down.” He crawls on his belly toward the door and I follow, shimmying up to the bottom of the pyramid. I can just barely peek through someone’s calves into the room. There’s thick carpeting. A pair of sneakers stand by what looks like a bed.
“What is it?”
“Man, c’mon, are you stupid or what? Jake Dillinger has Katrina in there and we’re watching.”
“Oh, wow—Jake?” I mumble. “Those are Jake’s feet?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow.” I stare at the cool feet. “Hey, where does that leave Christine?”
“Shut up and watch!”
Jake’s feet aren’t moving much and Katrina’s feet aren’t visible at all—they must be spread out and up. If I look up to try and see more, all I get is a little bit of the ceiling and the crotches, shrouded in pants, of the boys above me. I do hear lots, though: mostly Jake grunting, which sounds like the grunting he does with his football buddies, and little whimpery noises from Katrina, like the ones Brooke made when I kissed her, the ones that mean “keep going,” and then the occasionally responsive “Whoa” from Jake. There’s also the constant murmur of the boys, making sure that everybody shuts up so Katrina doesn’t hear them and they can all make their witty comments. And there’s the underpinning bass rumble of rap.
It’s sad that I get turned on by this. It’s very similar to the sex I enjoy on my own—voyeur sex, cybersex, looking at movies and pictures, seeing other people and wondering what it would be like if they were me. I feel that glow in my crotch and I smile and I’m ashamed.
“This sucks,” Rich says next to me, like a snake. “You could see everything before. I guess we’re going to have to depend on Carlton.”
“Carlton Hafer-Mules?”
“Yeah.”
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“Dyed-his-neck-hair-Carlton? Is he up there?” I nod at the guys above me.
“Yeah.” Rich seems to think that’s the most obvious thing in the world. “He has a great digital camera. He puts up pictures of the Hot Girls all the time. Lots of Stephanie and Chloe, but mostly Katrina.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Course not. Try KatrinaStephanieChloe.com.”
“Jeez…You know I saw Stephanie and Chloe earlier tonight?”
“Yeah, man! I heard you went to the basement with Chloe! What happened?”
“Nothing. Nothing good.”
“Jeremy, what’s wrong with you? Even with a squip you can’t get laid? What—”
“Oh, man…” Jake mumbles from his room of sex. Then, unbelievably, there’s some kind of farting noise. The whole libido pyramid above me shudders with laughter.
“Whoa!”
“I didn’t even know that could happen.…”
“Get it on tape! Did someone get it on tape?”
“Guys, don’t let me fall!”
My whole leg goes dead as someone teeters off the mountain and lands on my calf.
“Aggh,” I hear a moan behind me. “My spine…”
I wriggle backward and turn over. My leg hurts like it got pegged with a girder, but the other guy landed on his back; you can really mess yourself up landing on your back. “Are you all right?” I ask. He’s rolled off me and is sitting by the wall.
“Yeah, of course,” he shrugs. It’s Eric, the guy with the one eyebrow.
“Eric.”
“Yeah, hey, Jeremy, right? Thanks for breaking my fall. I heard you stopped doing those sheet things.” Eric scrambles back up the pile to watch more of Katrina and Jake. Screw him. Screw this.
“Where are you going?” Rich asks from the floor as I limp down the hall to the living room. I say nothing. When I get to the room, one make-out couple has graciously moved from a couch to the floor so I have a place to hibernate. I get on the couch and remove the cushions and hold one of them to my chest and roll into the crook of the furniture and try to control myself as the world shimmers around me with a pleasure that’s so empty. Right? I think about Christine; she must be sad that the guy she’s dating is banging some other girl down the hall and getting photographed for a Web site.
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Stupid and alone and on drugs, I activate the squip.
IDIOTA, IDIOTA, IDIOTA. TODO LO QUE USTED ES BUENO PARA ES SEXO DEL INTERNET.
All I’m good for is sex on the Internet. Shutdown.
Thirty-seven
“Jeremy, do you want some water?”
“Yes please,” I say, not knowing who I’m saying yes to, only that it’s a girl. And that I said please (like I’m supposed to). I turn around like a dolphin. My eyes have been open on this couch, but I don’t know how long.
“Here,” the girl kneels in front of me. She hands me a cup. “People said you got bad E and you were freaking out.”
“Christine!” I say. I reach out to touch her hand. She doesn’t mind; she touches back. I sip water from her cup. “I don’t know if it was bad E,” I mumble through wet lips. The water slides down my throat as if gravity just got doubled. “It was bad, though. I don’t know. I never did it before.”
Christine nods. “You don’t look like you’ve done much.”
“Yeah…at least it’s, uh, better now. The world stopped shaking.” Hkkkk, sputter; I drink more water. “You don’t look like you’ve been having such a great time either.”
“No.” She shakes her head twice, very deliberately. Her eyes are red and streaked, but they’re still dense and brown and beautiful. Her hair is still shiny.
“Sorry,” I say, sitting up in one corner of the couch and scrunching my knees to my chest with the cup perched on top of them. The cup has Cupid on it. Maybe if I sit in one corner she’ll sit in the other corner. “I’m sorry about Jake.”
“Oh,” she waves her hand, squatting on the floor. “That was like, way over. That was over two days ago. He can do whatever he wants with skanky girls in rooms while boys watch. _ _ _ k _ _ _ a_ _ _ _ _ e.”
I’m tired of Christine not being next to me, so I pat the couch to my left. She sits down. “He totally just started acting really weird a week ago. Like, he had layers to him. On the outside he seemed like a very confident high-school magnate, you know? You know what a magnate is?”
“Yes. Like a business guy.” I look around the living room—it looks like winos have been fighting in here with baseball bats. There are liquor bottles strewn around and dents in the walls and ash and cigarette burns.
“Right. And then under that he had this whole other layer of sensitive, misunderstood wannabe-writer-type stuff, you know?”
“Jake’s a writer?”
“He writes journals.”
“Okay.”
“But then the third layer was like his underlying evil dick layer.”
“Ah.”
“I mean, I couldn’t believe it—you remember my system of stages?”
“Of course.”
“Well, we went from Going Out to Him Just Being an Evil Dick really fast.”
“Heh,” I huff. “I thought you came with him tonight.”
“No. I came by myself.”
“Really? I went to the Halloween Dance by myself.”
“You were there?” She inches closer. “I had no idea!”
“Yeah, for like forty minutes.” How long ago was the Halloween Dance? A month? It seems like a month. A proper month of activity. I don’t believe those people who say that “time goes so fast” and “your life is short.” I’m bored enough that I always have a realistic sense of the actual, agonizing pace of a month. When you’re in a room with no TV and just the Internet and not much homework and no friends, a month is a month. And this last month feels like a month, so full of unbelievable—
“Jeremy? Still with us?”
Right. “Sorry. I saw you dancing,” I say.
“At the dance?”
“Yeah. You had that hat on, remember?”
“Oh, yeah….That’s a traditional Sardinian princess hat. My mom made it out of linen. She’s a historian.”
“Oh.” It’s a good thing Christine didn’t ask me what linen was, because I really don’t know.
“What about you?” she continues. “I didn’t see you dancing.”
“I didn’t.”
Christine sighs. “You never do. Right?”
I nod.
“You nerdy boys, all the same.” She kicks her heel against the couch and turns her head away, then back. “You’re always so proud of what you can’tdo.”
“That’s not true!” I stand up. How did things turn out like this? Christine is here—and Jake isn’t! This rocks. “I’m not happy I can’t dance! I just can’t! It’s like a birth deficit! I mean defect!”
“That’s not true,” Christine says. “If you stopped thinking about yourself and just thought very academically about moving lightly so the girl could follow, you’d be fine.”
“So come dance!” I beckon to her. I steady myself in the middle of the living room, shake my groin, close my eyes, bite my lip, put my hands on my hips and gyrate. Oh yeah.
“I’m tired,” she dismisses. “Maybe some other time. There’s no music.”
“Blukhuhuhuhuhuh—” Laughter from across the room. “Shot down!” It’s Rich, lounging on his own couch watching an infomercial set to mute, curiously without a girl on his stomach. There’s a glass ashtray next to him on the floor with a cigarette in it. He looks up at me. “You two are so-o-o cute.”
“Shut up, Rich.” I turn to him. He throws the ashtray at me; I duck. The cigarette tumbles out and lies on the carpet while the ashtray hits a piano across the room, sounding middle C. (I used to take piano.) We all laugh.
I sit back on the couch with Christine, closer to her now. I like this—this late-party laid-back atmosphere, minus the music and the public sex and the angry jocks and the Spanish voice in my head. Somehow, like coming out of a tunnel, I’ve ended up with one person I really like and another—I look over at Rich—who I’ve kind of come to tolerate. Bombs have dropped and I’m happy in craters. I’m tired, though. I have to get home. I’ve got to start up—
HERE.
“You! Back in English!” I yell, getting up from the couch. Then I instantly sit back down as if nothing happened.
NICE ONE.
“What was that?” Christine asks, her eyes bugged.
“Rookie mistake!” Rich laughs, slapping his hand against his face. “Aw, you talked to your squip! Rookie mistake!”
YEAH. GOOD JOB. AND WE NEED TO TALK.
“Shut up,” I hiss, sitting with my arms crossed, though I’m not sure who I’m talking to.
“What’s yersquip?” Christine asks, looking at me.
“That’s…my…imaginary…friend,” I explain.
“Huh, yeah,” Rich keeps laughing. “It’s what he calls his p-penis.”
“Would you shut up?” I throw a cushion at Rich.
“You have a name for your penis?” Christine asks. “Boys really do that?”
YEAH. RICH’S IS NAMED LI’L’ CHEESE HEAD.
“Yeah. Rich’s is named Li’l’ Cheese Head,” I say. Christine laughs and laughs and smiles, so I smile back at her. Rich throws his heavy shoe at me.
WE STILL NEED TO TALK.
“Uh, excuse me.” I shinny out of the living room, duck the other shoe. “Back in a minute.”
“Going to play with your imaginary friend?” Rich yells. Then: “Freak!”
But he says it with love.
I walk upstairs to the only bathroom I’m familiar with, the one where I saw Stephanie. I peek inside to make sure she hasn’t returned. I close the door behind me and look at myself in the mirror. I do this at home; it’s the easiest way to talk to the squip. Screw what it says—telepathy is hard on the brain.
“Okay, what do you want?” I stare at the mirror.
WHAT DO I WANT? WHAT DO YOU WANT? WHY DON’T YOU TELL ME? I’M JUST GETTING BACK UP TO SPEED AFTER A RUDE DRUG INTERRUPTION.
“Yeah, I caught that. You weren’t too functional back there.”
I TOLD YOU TO TURN ME OFF.
“Whatever. You have too many rules.”
SO WHAT DO YOU WANT, JEREMY? CLEARLY, IT’S NOT TO GET LAID. I WORKED INCREDIBLY HARD TO GET YOU IN THE POSITION YOU WERE IN TONIGHT. I UTILIZED QUANTUM TELEPORTATION TO MINE OTHER SQUIPS FOR INFORMATION; I DELVED DEEP INTO MY OWN HUMAN MODELING ENGINES; I PLANNED DRIVING ROUTES, VERBAL ONE-LINERS, AND POINTS OF ATTACK ON THE FEMALE BODY; I SET YOU UP WITH A GIRL TO BRING YOU HERE AND A FEW BACKUPS IN CASE YOU MADE MISTAKES, AND I MADE SURE THEY WERE ALL, HANDS DOWN, THE MOST GORGEOUS FEMALES IN YOUR LIMITED UNIVERSE. AND YOU THREW IT ALL AWAY. SO WHAT? WHAT DO YOU WANT? ARE YOU REALLY GAY?
“No. I didn’t throw it away. Bad things happened.”
YOU COULD HAVE GOTTEN WITH STEPHANIE. AND CHLOE…YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE TAKEN HER DRUGS. IF I HAD BEEN ON I WOULD HAVE TOLD YOU TO STAY OUT OF THAT BASEMENT. PROBABILITY AMPLITUDES WERE UNSTABLE IN THAT BASEMENT.
“Yeah, but see, this doesn’t matter. Because I want Christine.”
SO?
“That’s it.”
SO?
“That’s who I like and that’s who I want to be with, and when I think about it, that—I mean, she—is the reason I got you in the first place.”
SO.
“So you are going to start listening to me, now, because I am the human being and I make the decisions and I don’t care how many qubits you have or whatever because you are supposed to give advice like you said at the beginning!”
SO YOU WANT A COMPLETE PARADIGM SHIFT.
“I’m sorry?”
A COMPLETE SHIFT. A TOTAL MOVEMENT AWAY FROM WHAT YOU WANTED BEFORE. A NEW ANGLE. A NEW SET OF GOALS. A NEW DIRECTION FOR YOUR ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE AND MODELABLE LIFE. YOU NOW REJECT THE NOTIONS THAT YOU HAVE BEEN FED BY TELEVISION AND THONGS AND XXX THE MOVIE AND XXX ON THE INTERNET. YOU NOW WANT TO DEVOTE YOURSELF ENTIRELY TO THE CARE AND REDEMPTION OF CHRISTINE CANIGLIA, WHO SETS YOUR HEART AFLAME?
“Jesus. Are you still on drugs?”
NO, YOU ARE. AM I RIGHT?
“Yes. I want to be with Christine and then I’ll be happy.”
WHY DO YOU NEED ME, THEN?
“What?”
YOU’VE TALKED TO HER WITHOUT ME. YOU WERE JUST TALKING TO HER WITHOUT ME. MY PLANS TO WIN HER AFFECTION HAVEN’T WORKED. WHY NOT RELY ON YOURSELF?
“Well, _h_ _.”
WHAT ABOUT IT?
“You’re my squip.”
YES.
“I need you. You’ve been here all along.”
TRUE. OFF AND ON.
“I mean, I need your help. Advice. How to win her over. What to say. What kind of gifts to get her. When to make disapproving noises when she talks about which one of her friends. How to touch her. All the sexual stuff. I still need that, I think.”
SO YOU NEED ME.
“Yes.”
THEN LET’S DO THIS. AND LET’S NOT WASTE TIME. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM OPENS IN TWO WEEKS.
“Yeah.”
BY THE TIME YOU DO YOUR BOWS, YOU’LL BE WITH CHRISTINE. I HAVE A NEW PLAN.
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